Pages

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Rislaine Belhamiti - 5 things I love about Film

Rislaine Belhamiti is a 23 year old photographer based-in Paris, France. She very soon felt in love with film photography. After we featured her Polaroid project Parce que là-haut here, she decided to tell us 5 reasons why she love shooting film.

"I prefer to write a little text that shows those five points I really like in film, I put those different points in bold in the text below."

1. What first brought me to film photography was the desire to experience all types of photographic processes, because my first camera was digital, I very soon felt the need to experience another way of taking photos.

2. When I got my first film developed, one of the things I immediately really liked about the photos was the reproduction of colors. Some of the pictures have very bright colours, the sky is very blue, much more than how it was that day, everything seems to have been set up here, somewhere we've never been to, and yet very familiar...

And on other photos the colours are like fading away, gently dying... and it brings us to some other kind of world... where everything has existed once, and now is not...

3. And this is also linked to another aspect of film that I really like : the "painting-like-photography" that some instant films tend to give us. Polaroid often reminds me that photography is not the "reflection of reality" that people thought it was when it first was invented. For me Polaroid is a kind of poetry because it takes reality and turns it into a dreamy image form...

4. Because of money, I couldn't develop all my films recently, and have been waiting weeks before I even dared to go to the cheapest developement shop to timidly give them 4 colour films, leaving my black and white ones still in the fridge as they didn't do B&W... and while waiting for all these films to be developed, something inside of me was beating more than usual, as I realised that I forgot what I photographed, and then I knew... it was something that keeps me very attached to film photography: Surprise.

5. Because for me, film is also linked to feelings and memories, and because he gave me my first film cameras, and because he encouraged me and because without him I would only be dreaming about photography today, I feel close to film because it reminds me of my Love(r).